Even Mises Could Be Conned by Governments

By -
He says so himself on page 780 of the Scholar's Edition of Human Action:

In dealing with the problems of the gold exchange standard all economists--including the author of this book--failed to realize the fact that it places in the hands of governments the power to manipulate their nations' currency easily.

Comments

  1. TokyoTom3:12 AM

    And even Mises thought it possible to try to change laws to reduce externalities:

    “It is true that where a considerable part of the costs incurred are external costs from the point of view of the acting individuals or firms, the economic calculation established by them is manifestly defective and their results deceptive. But this is not the outcome of alleged deficiencies inherent in the system of private ownership of the means of production. It is on the contrary a consequence of loopholes left in this system. It could be removed by a reform of the laws concerning liability for damages inflicted and by rescinding the institutional barriers preventing the full operation of private ownership.”

    http://mises.org/humanaction/chap23sec6.asp


    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/10/11/draft.aspx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy4:47 PM

    What did Mises think about stalking?

    ReplyDelete
  3. TokyoTom10:43 PM

    Dunno, but I suppose that if he had a blog he'd probably welcome some if the comments were interesting, not obnoxious and helped to add traffic.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Silas Barta11:41 AM

    ROFL at exchange. :-D

    Bob is acting like Stephan Kinsella: equating "posting criticism in public forums" with stalking. To complete the pattern now, he has to send TokyoTom lewd messages and threaten to reveal information he's found about him.

    You up for it, Bob?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more